Red Dead Redemption 2
Scored 10/10. A perfect score for a game that does not waste a single mile of its world.
A 10 is not a score this page hands out to be nice. A 10 means the game did everything it set out to do, at a level almost nothing else reaches. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the easiest 10 on this bench.
THE GANG, THE LAND, THE END OF BOTH
America, 1899. The Van der Linde gang runs from a Blackwater ferry job gone wrong, and Arthur Morgan watches the outlaw life die in slow motion around him. Rockstar built a frontier that feels lived in down to the mud: towns with routines, weather with moods, animals with their own whole ecology running whether you watch it or not.
WHAT MAKES IT A 10
Restraint. The game trusts quiet. Long rides, small conversations, work done with your hands. Then, when it decides to be loud, the loud lands twice as hard because the quiet bought it. The writing respects the player, the world respects the story, and the ending respects both. That is the whole checklist for a perfect score, checked three times.
This is also the game running as a series on Moe Train Games, which tells you where it sits in the house. The industry's number is below. Ours is at the top, and it is not changing.
THE INDUSTRY NUMBER
Two scoreboards live on this page and they never mix. The score at the top is Moe's, argued above and signed. The industry's number, the collective critic aggregate, sits here for reference: Metacritic 97, with a 95 Top Critic Average on OpenCritic. Same game, two verdicts. Read both, then play it yourself.
